Self-Control is open
Self-Control is now open to everyone. Here's what opening day gives you — and the idea underneath all of it.
The one idea
Everything in Self-Control starts from a schedule, not a to-do. You create a task — Plants, Bills, Trash night, a Sunday review — give it a few items and a day-based schedule, and the app generates a dated occurrence for each day the schedule fires. Every occurrence is its own snapshot, with its own checklist.
So Tuesday's watering and Friday's are two separate facts, not one entry teleporting around the week. Miss a day and it waits for you, exactly where it was; the next one still arrives on time. Nothing rolls up into a pile that describes the app's bookkeeping instead of your life. Recurring routines is the longer tour of that mechanism.
What you can track on day one
- Six schedule rules, mixed in one task — weekly, day of month, nth weekday, week of month, yearly, and fixed interval. "Every other Tuesday, plus the last day of the month" is a single schedule, not a workaround.
- A Today view, four ways — a plain list, an hour-by-hour grid, a Priorities board that sorts by what actually matters, and a Load gauge for when you just need to know whether today is too full.
- A month calendar across everything you track, so a heavy week is visible before it lands — and the family calendar lays the household's days side by side.
- One-offs and on-demand tasks — not everything repeats. Drop a single dated task on the calendar, or start something the moment you decide to, without inventing a fake schedule for it. Reusable store lists work the same way — pull a fresh run each trip; the list itself stays whole for next time.
- Projects — for work that moves through a queue, like a reading list or a home renovation. Each session pulls the next batch instead of re-copying the whole list every time.
- Snooze and reschedule — move a single day without breaking the pattern behind it.
Built to be returned to
- No streaks. Ever. A missed day isn't a verdict, and we won't turn it into one. The occurrence you missed just stays put until you check it off, dismiss it, or move on.
- Forgiving on purpose — it's "dismissed," not "skipped"; "previous," not "overdue." The words are chosen carefully, because with this kind of app the words are the product.
- Reminders on your terms — an email the evening before, or a single morning digest, in your timezone. Both stay off until you ask for them.
Share the load
Chores and bills are rarely one person's job. Invite your household — up to four people on the free tier — and share a task so everyone sees the same state. It's one shared record per chore, never a scoreboard per person. When someone else takes out the trash, it's simply done.
Your data stays yours
No third-party trackers. No advertising cookies. No analytics SDK quietly studying how you use the app — that's a decision built in, not a toggle you have to go find. Export everything you own to JSON or CSV whenever you like. Your history belongs to you, to keep or to take with you.
The shape of it
The web app is live, and free for up to ten tasks. Pro is $5.99 a month — or $47.99 a year — for a hundred. The iOS and Android apps are in invite-only testing and will follow when they're ready. Push notifications aren't here yet; they're on the roadmap, and we'd rather ship them well than ship them loud.
That's opening day. A fridge list — plants, bills, trash night, and a weekly review you'll actually come back to — fits comfortably in the free tier, with room to spare.